One person's journey to play the 100 best board games in the world.

Lists and Letters

This past weekend I ended up playing games with several different groups of friends. Between the cold weather and everything going on in the world, there were plenty of people eager to dive into a board game for a little while.

On Friday night, 10+ people got together at my friend Jen’s house, where we played a bunch of fairly quick games, and one longer one that I was really eager to get to the table. Here’s the full list:

I had never played three of these games before, and I really was taken with Love Letter. It’s played with just 16 cards and comes in a tiny pouch – but this little game packs a big punch. Everyone has a hand of just one card. Players take turns drawing one and discarding one, and taking an action related to their discarded card. The highest card at the end wins, but if you can deduce another player’s card, you have a chance to knock them out of the game. It’s quick, compact, and a great social deduction game. One piece of advice- even though you’d never want to discard the Princess, don’t act like your choice is obvious when you’re holding her. It’s a dead giveaway!

As the “main event”, so to speak, Captain Sonar deserves its own full review. It’s not in the BGG top 100 yet, but it’s new and is steadily climbing along, currently at 181. It’s fairly difficult to acquire a copy at this point (I was lucky to get it when I did), but the next print run should push it across the mark. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for my review of this frenzied battleship simulator.

On Saturday evening, my wife KC and I got together with our friends John and Janine to play Mystery of the Abbey. Originally published in the 90’s and republished by Days of Wonder in 2003, it’s a murder mystery that takes place in a medieval French abbey. As often happens when I play games with KC, she beat us all soundly. It was an interesting game, and definitely an improvement over Clue in that genre.

KC beat me, 4 to -3. Yes, that’s negative three.

On Sunday I played Scythe. I’m very excited to post my review of it, which will be coming out this Friday. Also noteworthy for this site, I’m continuing to update my list which tracks my progress with the BGG Top 100. You can look there for links to all my Top 100 reviews, and I’ll try to update the rankings from BGG at the start of each month. I’ve also added notes about which games I’ve managed to track down a copy of, so if you know where I might find one of the others (ideally to borrow, or at less than retail price- I can’t just go buying 100 games!), I’d love to hear from you!